A recipe for rich media
Instantly create a photo collage with just one tap of the screen
One neat way you can use the Shortcuts app is by using your images from the Photos library and combining them in creative ways. You can, for example, create collages from a series of photos you’ve taken, a grid of imagery, or even a wall of album artwork. This example makes a grid of recent photos. Once you’ve built and run it, experiment by changing the actions’ settings.
Multiple choice
The Choose From List action lets you pick from the images output by the preceding action, which are passed as input to it. Turn on Select Multiple to be able to pick more than one item, which is vital for our collage! This reveals an option to start with everything selected, if you want. This action shows rich previews of whatever you pass to it — it can show album art if preceded by Get Details of Music, say.
Combine images
Use this to create collages or photo strips. The action stitches images together fast, side by side or in a grid. If you pick the latter, you can add spacing between the images to get things looking good — be sure to pass in the correct quantity to avoid an incomplete square at the end of this example.
Search/filter your photos
The Find Photos action searches for images and videos in your library. Add criteria to narrow down the range of items that’ll be presented to you, and choose the order in which they’re sorted. Our example returns favorited items taken in the last three months. Optionally, you can impose a limit on how many items are retrieved.
Resize image
Any and all images passed into the Resize Image action will be adjusted automatically to the specified width and height. If one of those measurements is left blank, the action resizes proportionally; otherwise, it’s possible to distort the input, so be careful and bear that in mind if you ever get odd results where this action is involved.
Save to a photo album
This action is what actually saves the new image created by Shortcuts into your photo library. Since you may interact with all types of photo content in your shortcuts, they aren’t autosaved to your library, so ensure you use this in every image–processing shortcut where you want to retain the result.